Meet ROOT

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Meet our 2025 Grantees

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Meet ROOT — Meet our 2025 Grantees —

WHO WE ARE

Starfish is an artist-led nonprofit building essential creative infrastructure for a changing cultural landscape. We support mid-career artists from marginalized communities with funding, strategic guidance, and artist-owned tools that enable creative and economic sovereignty. Our mission is to back cultural architects forging new pathways beyond extractive systems.

OUR APPROACH

We champion artists who refuse to wait for outdated systems to validate them — creators reimagining how culture is made, shared, and sustained.

We invest in the future by backing early-stage innovators who are building new models for creative work and community.

We build bridges by connecting creators with funding, strategic support, and audiences hungry for new perspectives — and by developing artist-owned infrastructure that supports long-term independence.

OUR STORY

Starfish is an artist-led initiative founded to identify the cultural industry’s blind spots and design new pathways for equity, innovation, and sovereignty. We began with deep research and conversations with key stakeholders and mid-career artists navigating a rapidly shifting landscape.

This work led to a pilot accelerator with four creators whose journeys affirmed the need for our approach and underscored how collapsing legacy systems were leaving artists to invent new models on their own.

Witness their journeys here.

WE LEARNED

The cultural landscape is transforming at lightspeed. Old systems are shrinking or extractive, while old categories — “media,” “tech,” “arts,” “entertainment” — no longer reflect how artists who are shaping the future actually work.

We learned we needed to broaden our lens, supporting artists building across forms, platforms, and disciplines. And we learned that by backing the builders — the artists who treat these gaps as invitation, not setback — we can seed the next generation of creative ecosystems.

These creators aren’t trying to “make it” in the old system. They’re building what comes next.

Apply Here

WATCH

“The future of culture will be shaped by the artists who build new models. Starfish exists to support them as they create what comes next.”

MAHYAD TOUSI - STARFISH FOUNDING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & ARTIST

WELCOME TO STARFISH

WELCOME TO STARFISH

OUR FUNDING PARTNERS

Anchor Funders

Funders

Special Contributions

Mahyad Tousi / Artist Contribution from the Kanon K21 Collection Auction

Donate Today

NEWS AND PRESS